Saul spun through a bunch of responses and chose none of them. The story didn't make sense yet. The Blanks usually called people about old wounds and future narratives. That was just how it tended to be. So far, this didn't fit. Maybe Hooky had a sister who drowned.
Hooky went on. “I mean, we hung out at a bonfire that night and went swimming.” He looked up at Saul. “I do this a lot. I meet girls and we swim.”
“It's good work if you can get it.”
“I lost track of her.”
Saul rubbed his bald head. “So you're telling me you saw the girl and she disappeared.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I don't have to tell you, Cliff, but you have a dangerous hobby. Swimming at night. People do drown.”
Hooky really seemed to want to find the right words when he said simply, “I felt… despair.”
“Mm. Well, if you lost track… I can see despair. You look for someone and don’t find them and that’s what despair, is, actually. When you lose hope for what you’re trying to do.”
“No,” Hooky said, meeting Saul’s eyes. “It was thick. It was despair like—like a wave. Like an arm, tugging at me.”
Saul couldn't grab onto anything the kid was telling him. He wanted to force the book back into Hooky's hand, but it didn't work that way. It had to be invited, even silently.
But the kid wanted to reach that story. He could tell it.
“Okay,” Saul said, thrusting his hands in his pockets. “Let me offer you this. Despair. That's real. Keep your nose clean. That's all anyone can do. Look, you live in a shack on a beach with a bunch of teenagers. I can relate, I operate a business that relies on them and one false move can get me shut down by the local Puritans. So: keep your head down. And it wouldn't kill you to find a job.”
“I'll ignore that last bit.” Slight smile.
“It's up to you.” Saul patted Hooky on the shoulder and started leading him out of the book section.
They passed under the beaded curtain and Saul stopped to admire the stage, the microphones. He liked what the kids could do. “So what did the book say, anyway?”
“How does it work?” Hooky asked.
“That was the title?”
“No, I mean, how does it work? How does it just make a title like that?”
“It makes a whole book, but the how is a mystery.”
“Korea,” Hooky said. “It was titled Korea.”
“No offense, but that doesn't surprise me.”
“I'm a cliché,” Hooky said.
“One of the best. One more thing.”
“What's that?”
“Watch out for my niece. She's too young to be your type so I'm thinking this is a safe mitzvah to ask.”
“Watch out for Frannie?”
“Yeah. I got a feeling. Watch out for her,” Saul said.
Hooky nodded.
Chapter 15
Callie awakened with slow awareness to the dry winds coming in through her window, drifting into consciousness with the sigh of wind through the palms. She turned over in bed, reaching for her husband's shoulder, feeling her hand fall to the mattress.
Mort had cracked up against a palm tree one night two years before and she found her most likely time to forget all that was the middle of the night.
She was six blocks from the ocean, hidden in a cul-de-sac, but at this hour she could hear the sound of waves and the clanking of lines at the marina.
Music wandered in from the ocean, too, jaunty kid's music that she thought of as doggerel. Music like that was ugly; she was thirty-five, but she was far enough from youth to think that music turned young people into animals and broke down the natural order of things.
She was awake now, My God, were they still playing music on Ocean Highway at 2 in the morning? What kind of town did they think this was?
Ugh. That old man who ran the café, he was the one responsible. The guy couldn't be over fifty, and he carried himself with a sensual sort of confidence that Callie found intrusive, his hands in his trousers and his bald head squared over densely packed shoulders.
Who the hell cared about Saul Cohn, anyway? Except that now he had gone and broken the law again with this music, she was sure of it, and Callie would have to deal with it, would have to because tomorrow her phone would surely be ringing off the hook with complaints for the Decency League to deal with.
She rose, her feet cold against the floor even through her socks, which were all she wore as she went to the window. She turned on the radio she kept on a table next to the window and “All in the Game” began to play.
She found some clothes and within minutes she was driving.
Chapter 16
“I need to get some sewing patterns. Is there anything you’d like me to make?”
Frannie stared out the car window and didn’t respond. She was thinking about how there had been a girl looking back at her through the bamboo stick. She carried the stick in her purse all Saturday morning at Temple and now she had it out, absently turning it, feeling its hard knots as she rode with her mother. She became aware that her Mom was talking to her.
Frannie looked down at her dress. She had no idea if she wanted her mother to make anything. “I’m fine with jeans, Mom,” she said.
“You should wear a dress to work on Monday. Or at least a skirt.”
Frannie sighed. Actually a dress was better for wearing her bathing suit under and running across the highway to surf. That was okay. She made a noncommittal sound.
She wanted to bring the stick to her eye again, wanted to see if the eye was looking back at her again, but she looked out at the passing buildings.
She couldn’t wait. She brought it out of her purse and up to her eye to look through it at a Clifton’s Cafeteria, and the cafeteria only looked back, the baby-blue Studebaker reflecting in the windows of the building they passed next. She put the bamboo away, watching the stucco columns of the bank they were passing now.
As her mom parked on the street, Frannie had the sudden urge to burst from the car and run from downtown, take a right on any of the arteries that headed straight to Ocean Highway and throw herself on the waves. The waves felt right there. She could reach them in minutes, and she saw herself building a hut like Hooky had and living off of abalone and crabs, content forever.
“Frannie,” her mom said as she cut the car off. “Come on, let’s do the marketing.” Frannie nodded and sullenly followed her mom through their errands. She swayed to the sound of waves in her mind while they stood in line at the bank, the druggists, and she started to feel herself coming awake only when she was standing in the fabric store. Or as she called it: Thirty-Seven Billion Bolts of Cloth.
Her mom was fingering a greenish fabric and said, “You not get any sleep?”
“Oh, I did.” Frannie was running her hand across a bolt the color of the ocean. The bolts against the beige shelves looked like the surfboards leaning on the hut and she thought of Newp, taking one and sizing it up.
“Is your uncle open today?”
“He’s open,” Frannie said. “He didn’t ask me to work Shabbos.”
“But he works,” Mom said.